Writing Advice: Action and Pacing

My friend David Powers King wrote a nice little blog on action and pacing. Essentially, in action sequences you have to work hard to keep the scene moving while still giving enough of the story that people feel engaged and not bored.

I'd add to this that you have to carefully select the details you want to include. I read a story by a friend once that felt very much like a video game sequence. Excessive detail and blow-by-blow description of each and every minuscule movement about killed me--the reader. I don't think he was going for that! I felt like I was inside a really poorly scripted game that just wouldn't move beyond cliche phrasing and tedious description.

On the other hand, if you don't have enough description, you can cause several other adverse reactions: Readers may have a hard time understanding what's going, as they did during a sequence in my current middle grade fantasy, Lizzie Peterson and the Places of Naming, when the main character uses magic to create an ice raft out of part of a river. It was a hard sequence because she was being attacked at the same time, and the river kept pulling the raft downstream. And she's in a cave. And there are three other supporting characters, too.

So I had to rewrite the scene about 10 times trying to balance enough description that you as the reader could really see what was happening but also keep the sense of peril high. Very tricky. In fact, it was the hardest scene to write in the entire book. I hope it works!

So don't be afraid to write a scene quickly to just get the idea out there. Then read it a day or two later and ask yourself if it makes any sense, if the pacing is still quick and sharp, if it is exciting to you as a reader (not as an author). Then get as many people to read it as you can stand. They'll be honest on all accounts, especially if it's not working.

Action and description and tense moments. Definitely a fine balance.

Road to ePublishing: Selecting a Cover Artist

There are many decisions one must face when traveling down the road to ePubbing.

Boy, that sounds really highfalutin, hoity-toity, doesn't it?

Yeah, so here are some decisions you have to make:

1. Will you have your book professionally edited? The answer: you'd better have somebody other than yourself do it, because you won't catch all the errors and plot hole etc. yourself.
2. Will you format it yourself? Well, I'm not going to. I want a sophisticated browsing experience with chapter links and the like. So I'll pay a few bills to have someone more talented than I am lay it out and prepare it for me.
3. What will you do for professional cover art?

This last one currently has me in the research quandary. I've researched at least a hundred artists now, many of them quite talented. I've been in touch with nearly a dozen, and they have all been quite talented as well. I'm seriously considering an experienced artist with credits and samples galore to demonstrate the ability to make marvelous images that really sell. But artists of any level do not come cheap. The price is something to consider.

I have yet to see an ebook that was self published that didn't have a computer generated simple design. Don't get me wrong--many of these are elegant and polished, and some not so much. And my research is not all encompassing. Still, these covers only cost in the ball park of $200 to $400, much cheaper than an artist or illustrator.

The ultimate questions are this:

Does an ePublished book for middle grade fantasy need artwork? If so, is it worth the investment for a top-billed client? Will 5-10 internal color illustrations help an ebook sell?

My current thinking is yes. There's an expression (I'm sure I'm going to garble this) in marketing that you ride the right horse, meaning you connect with the most talented, connected, and successful people you can and ride the horses along with them.  Under this scenario, it makes sense to get the best art you can. Joe Konrath is always stating that cover art is essential for successful ebooks.

So, readers, what do you think? What's the best kind of cover for a middle grade fantasy ebook? What investment here is necessary to make that little thumbnail image of your book on Amazon.com stand out? What price or investment would you be willing to make? Drop me a comment and let me know. I'm really curious if my thoughts agree with yours.

ePublishing Production Plan

Today my personal editor (my wife) and I discussed our ambitious production plan. Then it evolved into our entire product launch plan. And then I had even greater ideas. Woah. Very exciting. So here's a little taste of what we've done. Note that I haven't yet developed a production schedule. We still have some details to hammer out, some costs to fix, and some decisions to make. But we are getting closer to really launching the model and building to an online launch by August or September. I've revised the plan to produce 2 books and 2 novellas this year, followed by 2-3 books in the series next year, depending on how the creative side works with the development side, and perhaps more novellas, or some combination.

OK, here's some of the plan:

We broke the product development and launch into a handful of categories: Content development, Design, Marketing, Production. We then further broke these categories into specific components:

Content:
1st draft
2nd draft
Alpha readers
3rd draft
Beta readers
4th draft. These are complete.
Next:
Editorial review (by an outside editor, for marketability, consistency, and the like)
5th draft
Copyedit (my professional wife)
Proofread.

A this point, the ms gets split into print production for POD and ebook production cycles. I won't bore you with the details now, but they involve page layout, font type selection for text, chapter heads, titles, covers, and the like. Then we split between formatting and proofing the two types of product.

As for Marketing, this really involves a number of processes. We are very close to settling on an illustrator. I'll let you know more once we come to a mutual agreement on details, but suffice it to say I'm very, very happy with the contacts I've made, but one in particular is a shining star that would be just perfect in so many ways.

Also with marketing comes the prep for blog tours, press release, and heavy investment in social media. I'm also researching marketing firms (low chance there due to budget, and due to the fact that the research thus far indicates that most of them aren't really savvy yet with social media and ebook launches. I hope to find I'm wrong, but we'll see). I have found an interesting marketing blast plan through Createspace. I'll let you know what I decide there. It could be very helpful to you if it works. Suffice it to say that I'm not going to just throw my book up. It's going to require a lot of work to achieve visibility, and I hope to invest sufficiently in that realm.

Marketing also involves a website platform, the audio production (which has its own huge schedule), and mobile apps. The last part is an idea barely out of a two-hour brainstorm, but the possibilities are enormous. I'm really, really excited about that part. Again, once things begin to take a better form, I'll share what I'm doing there.

OK, I could put more specifics here, and perhaps I'll repost this in about two weeks when I have more details in concrete. But we're really hoping to launch a product that will be much, much more than just a black and white text novel, but an experience. Shoot me any ideas you might have, especially if you have connections with people who know how to build mobile apps. Thanks!

Road to ePublishing: Fiona Ostler

Today I'm going to host my first ever author interview with Fiona Ostler, a friend and fellow writer who has just launched her first e-book, Guardian: Gold Rush.


This will be a two-part blog. First, a little spoiler about Fiona's book. Then we'll continue with a Q&A, including how and why Fiona decided to take the plunge into epublishing.

Here's the teaser for Guardian: Gold Rush:

"Sixteen-year-old Ivy Rogers has a strange gift. She remembers her experiences as a guardian angel and dreams about what will happen in the future. When she dreams of skipping her math test the next day to rescue a complete stranger at LAX, that’s exactly what she does. Why? Because the boy in her dream was totally hot and she knows that she’s the only one who can help him.

"The boy is dashing young Lord Donovan Wooster, who possesses his own unique talent of talking with ghosts. He is traveling to the US to find the lost treasure his ancestors hid during the California Gold Rush. He’s being followed by two Irish brothers who seem to know his every move.

"When Donovan and Ivy connect, they are catapulted into a supernatural race against time to find the gold before the Irishmen find them. Along the way, Ivy discovers if the stranger in her dream is the man of her dreams."

Question and Answer
Joshua: All right, Fiona, time for a little Interview. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Fiona: Well, that's a question. I am a mom. I just had my forth child in March and I love Mommyland. My passions include writing, drawing, music composition and movie soundtrack scores, travel, food, walking, religion, psychology, and especially right now I'm really getting those homemaking skills down. I'm completely serious, too. I've gone from being a chaotic artist to a somewhat organized domestic goddess. My mom keeps coming into my house and tells me what a surprise it is to see it so clean and peaceful. Given the state of my room and life when I was growing up under her roof I'd guess she thinks that aliens have possessed my body. I write books for young adults, well, twelve to eighteen-year-olds.

Joshua: Sounds like you're really busy! Tell me, how did you start writing?

Fiona: All my life I've had story ideas, characters, and conversations bouncing around my head. As far as actually writing them down:

In forth grade my teacher, Ms. Blair, produced a play I wrote and we had an assembly where my class put it on for the whole school. Then, I took a break. In college I took several creative, fiction, and playwriting classes which were amazing and got me tinkering around with one acts and unfinished manuscripts that were okay. Then, I took another break. Shortly after my third child was born, President Uchtdorf gave an amazing talk in Woman's Conference (2008) about how creating things bring us joy. I felt that desire to write the ideas in my head once again, and almost was given permission to do so. As a mom, you just sacrifice everything and feel selfish if you do something for yourself, but I was empty and so lost at that point that I knew that I needed something, and writing was the answer. If you think about it, we are commanded to develop our talents or they will be taken away. And we are also commanded to not hide our light under a bushel, so...

I haven't taken a break since fall 2008 and have finished 3.5 novels.

Joshua: That's quite the accomplishment. Tells you what motivation and hard work can accomplish. So, tell us about your current project.

Fiona: It's complicated. I have a YA sci-fi that is being looked at by a small publishing company in New York. I'll know more about that later.

I'm trying to finish my forth book - a YA superhero book of sorts. I just read an ARC of a book coming out in May called DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth which was awesome and really got me thinking about how much deeper my world building needs to get for this story so I'm in "what if" land with this project.

But, the project that you are interviewing me for is my YA supernatural-historical-romance-adventure story Guardian: Gold Rush - the first in a three book series.

Joshua: Cool. I posted your teaser above. I think it's an interesting premise. Why did you decide to epublish?

Fiona: I have tried so hard to get an agent for Guardian: Gold Rush and have shelved it for the better part of a year. It's my first novel, and I love it to pieces - it helped me find myself in the depths of a post partum depression. And it's really a good fit for my experiments in epublishingland because I just want to get it out there, and I don't care if it makes any money. I'm going to keep writing and I'll break in eventually. The ideas, characters and conversations have not run dry. They keep coming. It's not a matter of if, but when. I just didn't want to leave this book behind as I move forward with my writing and epublishing has been a good way to do that.

My husband, Bret, was really the one who helped me get this all going. He got the book up on Kindle, and is now figuring out Barnes and Noble and iBooks, etc. (He's really the brains.) Bret was also kind enough to design a cover for me and has started putting together my website. It's not perfect, but I'm sick of GoDaddy's thong adds on my domain name, that we had to do something. Everything probably looks more like a sandbox creation than an actual glossy publishing house produced book launch, but It's been a blast. I'm grateful to be married to a technical/artistic genius! The rest of you might have to pay someone.

I'm loving the feedback I get now like, "Fiona, I keep trying to remember that you're the one who wrote this and not some author. It's actually good."

I've learned tons and it's been a blast. It's nerve racking because as a novice writer you keep waiting for an agent or publishing house to give you permission to say that you're an author. At what point are you good enough to say that? I think it's a personal decision. Right now, I'm saying that I am and I've chosen to put myself out there.

Joshua: Personally, I think you've made the right decision. I've started down that course myself, as you can see in my previous post. ePublishing is definitely the future of publishing. You've got permanent rights, and a permanent shelf space. Plus all the control over creative rights, and that huge royalty possibility. But enough of that. Tell me again where we can find your book? (Hey, I know I'm shameless promoting here, especially since it's linked to all over the place, but hey, take a look and see what you think.)

Fiona: Just type "Fiona Ostler" in an amazon search and there I'll be - Guardian: Gold Rush by, Fiona Ostler. It's $2.99. You can also get the first five chapters as a sample. Kindle readers are free and download to any computer - just set up an account with them.

Joshua: Awesome. I can't wait until mine is right up there with yours! So, what's next on tap?

Fiona: Potty Training my three-year-old.
Waiting to hear back from the Editor about the Sci-Fi book.
Finishing the sequels to GUARDIAN and epublishing them.
Trying to deeply build in my new superhero world thanks to Veronica Roth.
72 hour kits.
Read through and critique a few books from authors in my writing group.
Figure out better ways to market myself (yucky, crummy, hateful)
Start walking in the mornings again.
That's what's up.
Thank you so much for the interview and putting in a good word for me. And thank you to anyone who reads this interview and gives GUARDIAN a try.

Joshua: Thanks, Fiona, for a great interview, and best of luck to you on your first epublished title, just released today (April 18) on Amazon. And for the rest of you, if you haven't considered epublishing, get with it!